A Cactus Garden

by Jo Bannister

  It was Balrig, the foppish captain of Hornet Patrol, and he was standing close by a well-head installation and pointing at her. Michal jerked out of his lethargy fast enough to shout, “No!” and drag back on her hand, but as she spun, off-balance and bewildered, without warning her right breast exploded sending pain and shock like debris hurtling through her body.

  She lurched against Michal, stunned dumb, her eyes stretched and glazing. She dimly felt his arms around her, vaguely heard his voice. She could not breathe. Darkness crowded in. The last thing she knew was a throaty roar in her ears that she at first took for the flood-tide of death, then correctly identified as the engines of the shuttle coughing into life as she coughed out of it; and the recognition, which struck her as wryly typical of Mithras, that she was going to die taking perhaps the most sensational revelation in the known cosmos with her, untold. She tried, in the last moment of awareness left to her, to pass the knowledge on to her companion; but it had taken an hour of synapse-to-synapse communication between her and a planet for her to acquire it, and if Michal could decipher her faint whispered words he could make nothing of them, and soon the whispering ceased.

  Chapter Two

  Afterwards Paul searched his memory with obsessional thoroughness for anything that hinted, even in retrospect, at the events occurring only a stone’s throw away as he put the shuttle through its ground checks. The recognition that, seek as he might, there was nothing to find convinced him as nothing else could have done that his own lost perception was not sleeping, not maimed, but dead. If anything had survived the holocaust in his head he must have felt the pangs of Shah’s agony then, and he felt nothing.

  The shuttle mounted slowly until it was level with the top of the Hive. Then Paul vectored the thrust abruptly aft, and the little craft, its oiled planes catching the sun, shot forward like a racehorse from a starting-stall. It banked sharply round the conical apex – sending Amalthea’s clawed hands clapping to her ears with a lack of aplomb that would have been ample reward could Paul have seen it – before settling into the curving climb that would take it up to “Gyr”. The flight-path was devised to intercept “Gyr’s” orbit while the disc of Mithras masked her from the pirate ship. Paul did not know how good the SAM’s instrumentation was – possibly by now it was no more half-hearted than its armaments – but whatever there was of it would be focussed on the planet and its environs as soon as an image could be resolved. If the imaging was good they would already have seen “Gyr” and would know that the Hive had summoned aid, but Paul saw no reason to notify them that their approach was being monitored and a welcome prepared by displaying open activity around the battleship. By the time “Gyr” hove back into view the shuttle would be stowed and no change in status apparent. The small deceit might not fool them long, but every minute he could keep them guessing was ammunition in the psychology of combat.

  He had forgotten Chaucer the moment the shuttle’s console came to life under his touch, and he did not think of him again until the craft had coupled with the docking flanges and been drawn up into its bay in the midsection hold, the great silent doors shutting out the starlight. He felt the quake of their meeting as a shiver through the fabric of the black ship which awoke corresponding resonances along the nerves of his own skin. The tremor, final as a falling axe, put the seal on commitment. Paul switched on the infra-red.

  Chaucer’s face leapt into livid perspective beside him. The light was not flattering. The rosy flush along his cheeks and red glints in his eyes and beard were evocative of primaeval power: the Chancellor would have been worshipped as a devil on half a dozen worlds of Paul’s acquaintance. He leaned forward into the red light, eagerly, and for a silly surrealist moment Paul half expected him to flash a smile rich in vampire incisors. Grinning to himself at the thought, he wriggled out of his seat and through the airlock. “I’d bid you welcome to my ship,” he said, “but you might think I meant it.”

  “I would express my admiration,” smiled Chaucer, looking round him, “but you might take it for covetousness.”

  For the purposes of selling her services “Gyr” was described as an interstellar battle-cruiser. That made her a big ship. She was a particularly big ship for two people to go rattling around in, but Paul – who had had her to himself often in the past – had never heard the emptiness echo as it did now with a stranger dogging his heels where Shah should have been.

  In fact the accomodation on “Gyr” was not greatly out of proportion to the size of her complement. She had been designed and built for Paul, customised to the way he worked. Most of the bulk of the black ship was to do with her function and the nature of her voyages. Banks of armaments hedged her round with teeth. Her field of fire was virtually spherical, the batteries computer-governed and capable of as many operating patterns as the pilot cared to program. In a defensive watch-dog mode, she could direct a single burst from the most convenient muzzle to pick off any craft venturing within a buffer-zone defined by laser locaters. By contrast, the main cannon ranged across the bow and the leading edges of the manta wings could belt out enough sheer attacking force to disintegrate a good-sized asteroid.

  Bomb-rooms ran through the spine of the ship, separated from the fury of the guns by double blast-doors and stores of less sensitive equipment: water-tanks and purifiers, deep-frozen provisions for voyages years in duration, workshops, a laboratory that doubled as a medical unit, and supplies of spare parts for every aspect of the ship that could conceivably go wrong. Paul had no idea what some of them were, although he had lived and breathed this ship since before her launch. He entertained the sneaking suspicion that some of the odder items did not belong to “Gyr” at all, and only hoped that nothing vital of his was touring the scenic far side of the universe in the bowels of the ship whose substitute insides he had brought to Mithras.

  Centrally located at either end of the flight of bomb-rooms were the shield generators: a pair of them, each capable of sustaining the emission field which was “Gyr’s” prime defence through any probable assault. In the improbable event of “Gyr” meeting a cruiser of equivalent firepower, the old irresistible force/immovable object paradox would be resolved, though Paul doubted if there would be any survivors to report the outcome.

  The other main essentials of the ship were located in the wings to either side of the flight-deck: the ventilator, the main computer, the navigation system, the radio equipment. Failure in any of these areas meant failure of a mission and probable loss of the ship. Since there was little point in the crew surviving an assault if the life-support systems did not, the whole forward section of the ship was designed as one unit, to become its own lifeboat in the event of massive damage to the after-section. It was a fairly tenuous prospect of salvation for a crew heavily beset, but it was the only one. Disaster among the stars tended to be total.

  Completing the outline of the ship, four great engines stepped out on sweeping brackets girdled the stern section. That segment of space immediately behind her was the only gap in the globe of “Gyr’s” gunnery. It was not an omission. With four ion-drive engines pointed at them, no foreseeable enemy could hold together long enough to inflict damage. For all the cannon, lasers, torpedoes, missiles and exotic particle-rays in the catalogues of the interstellar arms merchants, nothing in space was more irresistibly lethal than the standard unit of power by which men crossed it. The fact was assiduously kept from the tourist classes who ventured abroad for pleasure and would have stayed at home had they known they rode Armageddon.

  Chaucer’s leonine head was turned with looking all ways at once as Paul conducted him through to the flight-deck. Any stubborn disappointment that had survived thus far vanished there. “Gyr’s” control centre was massively impressive, and more rather than less so for the designer’s obvious lack of interest in appearances. What impressed was the supreme unadorned efficiency of a layout of screens and instruments and terminals, in broad banks that filled all the horse-shoe wall and half the curved ceiling, and a
ll of them focused on the pilot. Sitting there, mused Chaucer, with so much power and so much death at his finger-ends, a man must feel like a god. He stole a sidelong look at Paul, already bent over a screen and thumbing up figures, and wondered if that was how he felt: like a god for hire. He wondered how gods felt about losing their divinity.

  Paul dropped into the driving-seat and became part of his ship. He said without looking up, “Find yourself somewhere to sit and don’t interrupt me.”

  “I can help you, if you will let me.”

  Paul looked round at him, narrow-eyed. Then he nodded. “All right. Run those through the computer.” It was the sheaf of calculations he had brought from the Hive. “I’ll call it up for you.”

  The hairs over the crest of his head and others Chaucer was unaware of down his neck and back stood up like soldiers at the realisation that the words were literally meant. Paul talked to his ship. It disturbed something fundamental in Chaucer’s view of the universe, in which machines were machines and intelligence was the prerogative of his people or those indistinguishable from them. The ability to communicate verbally was too close to intelligence for comfort, and he waited with his skin creeping to see if the computer would speak back. It did not. The eerie sensation subsided, but the unease did not. If “Gyr” was atuned to Paul’s voice, suborning it might prove infinitely more difficult than he had anticipated.

  No dark thoughts troubled Paul’s mind. The Mithraian’s assessment was correct: here he was a god in his own country – at home, confident, invulnerable. “Gyr” was his spiritual as well as actual power-base: all his strengths were rooted in her. He was not unconscious of the profound dangers that intermittently he faced with her. But he believed that she was probably the best fighting ship in the galaxy and that he was, taken all round, probably the best fighting man. If he also knew that no-one is more vulnerable than a man who believes implicitly in his own superiority, here in the heady miasma of the incense rising in his own temple he had forgotten. Arrogance is the weakness of the strong.

  “Gyr’s” instruments, better positioned and considerably more sophisticated than the al fresco devices in the Hive’s tiny radio-room, picked up the approaching vessel as soon as she swung clear of the planetary disc. It was reasonable, or at least cautious, to assume that the pirates saw “Gyr” at the same time, but Paul doubted if they enjoyed an image as clear as that which now flashed up on his screen and made Chaucer start like a hound scenting quarry.

  “That is them,” he rapped, his diamond eyes kindling. “But something is amiss – they should not yet be within screen range.”

  Paul grinned, not kindly. “I told you, the art of warfare has moved on in the last twenty years. Intercept is where and when I indicated. Long before that you’ll be able to count the rivets in her plates.”

  To all appearances, even on “Gyr’s” screen, the vessel was identical to a myriad other semi-armed merchantmen trading the star-routes. A giant hold with crew quarters at the front and a single ion engine at the back, they looked like nothing so much as a fleet of lit cigars. The standard armaments included medium-range cannon, close-combat lasers, a radar confusion capability commonly if inexplicably called Window, and a shield generator notionally though not effectively comparable with “Gyr’s”. The SAM weapons system was devised as an answer to renegades and local thugs, not to battleships.

  As to her non-standard armoury, Paul had only Chaucer’s description of the earlier attacks. This time when she opened fire, computers tied in to “Gyr’s” shields would plot every shell and swiftly draw up a profile of her fight characteristics. In the meantime Paul added twenty per cent to the estimates given him by Chaucer and fed those into the main computer as a working hypothesis.

  Long ago, in Chaucer’s vanished and little-regretted youth, on the small world that subsequently became the first colony of Amalthea’s first empire, there was a craze for shooting electronic aliens out of an electronic sky at ten shots a chip. The machines appeared in drinking-docks and pleasure palaces and transit stations in every city of the developed globe, to the accompaniment of flashing lights and explosive sound-effects and the chink of money. They went by such unashamedly chauvinistic names as Zap-a-Wog, and the idea was to shoot the approaching aliens off the screen before they could land and invade. For five years the game enjoyed a vogue akin to mass addiction, so that every coin in the treasury had first been through eight Zap-a-Wogs. Then, as is the way with crazes, interest began to wane. Interest finally died beyond hope of resurrection when a fleet of ships arrived from a neighbouring star-system bearing real aliens with black claws and guns who colonised the little planet virtually without hindrance while most of the population was playing Spot-the-Clone. Amalthea soon stopped them playing games.

  But when Chaucer turned from his frankly avaricious appraisal of “Gyr’s” flight-deck to find her commander apparently engrossed in a game of Zap-a-Wog on the computer screen his mouth went dry, his hands balled into fists and his heart skipped a beat, turned over and sank. With what he considered commendable restraint in the circumstances he managed to choke out, “What are you doing?”

  Paul looked up, distracted and scowling. “I told you, don’t get in my way. I haven’t so much time I can afford to waste it giving you a conducted tour.” Then he seemed to see the real horror in Chaucer’s seraphic face and he leaned back. “Look, don’t you understand? We’ll only get one chance at that corsair. If I get it wrong it’s going to cost me – my ship will get hurt, maybe I’ll get hurt, quite possibly I’ll have to blow the ungodly out of the sky, and then I’ll have to explain why to Amalthea. Thanks to your total lack of aptitude for self-defence, I don’t know what armaments I have to contend with. I can guess, or I can wait and see. Or I can program every possibility I can think of into the computer and let it show me what the result would look like – so that when I try spiking his engine and suddenly find myself eating his flak I know he’s got an Immelmann capability because I’ve seen it before, on this.” He stroked patterns over the console, his strong fingers on the keys as unconsciously sensual as if the instrument were a woman’s body, and the sketched image leapt and spat fire at him.

  As Chaucer watched the little ship race through a whole war’s worth of manoeuvres, the horror in his eyes yielded temporarily to fascination before slowly regaining the ascendancy. “You mean, that freighter can do all those things?”

  Paul grinned wolfishly, relishing his alarm. “Not all at once, I hope.”

  The bourgeois, complacent society of the little lost world submitted immediately and totally to the invader’s rule. But it quickly became apparent to Amalthea that taking a planet and ruling it as a colony were two different skills, and though she had plenty of warriors few knew the art of administration. Those who did, did well; and none did better than Chaucer, with his intelligence, his ambition, his capacity for work and his talent for manipulation that amounted almost to genius. After that, wherever Amalthea looked to extend her empire Chaucer went with her. He had been with her longer than any other member of her entourage, and she still frightened the life out of him. But she had never had cause to regret advancing him and, other than that he would not have chosen to be stranded on Mithras, Chaucer regretted nothing either.

  Only he thought he might just regret, just fleetingly, what he was about to do here. It was not that he liked Paul – who could? – but that he, like Amalthea, recognised talent when he saw it and was sorry to see it wasted. But he was resigned, knowing that even on a chain a tiger makes a perilous pet. He said, “‘Gyr’: what does it mean?”

  “Hm?” Paul straightened out of his concentrated hunch over the battle-screen and stretched, cat-like. He checked the time. There was a little of it still to kill and not much more he could do. He had a sudden craving for coffee. “Oh – it’s a hunting bird. They fly them after game in the ice deserts on the planet where she was built.”

  “Is that where you were born?”

  Paul eyed him wickedly and
said with disconcerting candour, “I wasn’t born, Chaucer – I was made. Coffee?”

  Chaucer nodded, bemused, understanding the one precept about as well as the other.

  Most of his adult life Paul had been alone. It had brought out unexpected strains of domesticity in him. Unless pressed by absolute necessity he never went more than twenty-four hours without cooking a proper meal, and he never left the washing-up. He was infinitely better in the galley than Shah, who was vague in approach and untidy in application. But she had brought a little gaiety into the functional place when she provisioned for the trip at a travelling Tawdry Fair, as a result of which the mugs which presently Paul brought, steaming, onto the flight-deck bore the legends “Celibacy leaves a lot to be desired” and “Apathy rules OK but who cares?” After a moment’s consideration he gave Chaucer “Apathy”.

  Chaucer drank and coughed. “That is disgusting.”

  Paul looked surprised. “Is it?” He drank. “Well, you wouldn’t want me nodding off in the middle of things. You can toast my success in something more to your taste when we get back to the Hive.”

  Chaucer kept on at the coffee like a man worrying a sore tooth. He nodded a general gesture around the bridge. “Who did you steal her from?”

  “Shah?”

  “‘Gyr’.”

  “I didn’t steal her.” His tone was flat, but the astute Chaucer could hear in his voice a pride of which Paul was quite possibly unaware. “I earned her. With ten years’work, and a lot of sweat, and a lot of pain. It was in the nature of a wager. The people I did the work for gambled I wouldn’t live long enough to collect.”

  “You did. Others did not?”

  “I don’t even know how many.” It might have been a boast, but Chaucer believed the bleakness in his eyes. He had seen such a look before, years ago, in the deep crypt of an aesthete’s temple renowned through half the empire for the beauty and sensitivity of its ancient paintings. Chaucer had asked the meaning of one of the figures. The aesthete guiding him had replied, “That is Lucifer, remembering the sun.” Paul had the eyes of a devil sick of sin.